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While I worked on Writing in Flow and for years afterward, I kept a folder of notes on creative writing. It got so I could easily figure out which parts of the creative process were being enhanced by what a particular author said or advised.
Now let me share some of the contents of that folder, along with the psychologically sound reasoning behind the best advice.
1. "Writing is hard, it's a job, a lot of times it's discouraging, and sometimes you could yank out all your hair. But when all is said and done, it's fun." -- Peter Hedges, a novelist, screenwriter, and film director. What Hedges is telling us is that writing needs to be both challenging enough to be thoroughly engaging, and pleasant enough at times to allow us to enter flow. When that job is so hard that we become utterly frustrated, we may long to quit, but by treating writing like any other job, we stick with it until ventually we work out the puzzles we've set for ourselves. Then we realize it's been fun after all.
2. "I don't write an outline or plot everything out. My office looks like a bomb hit it, totally unstructured. I do all the research first, and none of the writing, then I sit in front of what I've gathered and go to work. I take notes all the time, can't turn it off, use spare moments to jot things down. Then I go into seclusion; I go under, and I write the book." -- Patricia Cornwell, bestselling mystery author, has also said she thinks of writing as "a relationship," not a job. I like that, as it speaks to the idea that writing isn't about obligation so much as dedication and passion. Many writers take tons of notes before tackling the actual writing. When Cornwell refers to "going under," she means she enters a sort of trance state, that is, flow, in which the writing pours out.
3. "I don't really believe in the imagination....It's something one remembers. It's all in the unconscious, and you just dredge it up out of your memory." -- Beryl Bainbridge, an author, in my opinion, does not mean she makes up nothing in her novels. What she does is find ways to loosen up so that what is ordinarily buried beneath everyday consciousness can come out to play, so to speak. Other writers insist they do not use their own lives but make everything up. Most realize it's usually a mixture of remembered bits and pieces and imagined additions.
4. "I think that a lot of people have a lot of talent and end up not doing anything with it because they don't have that discipline. I have dogged, methodical ways of working rather than unbridled talent. I'm in there every day and just have my nose to it." -- Jane Hamilton, novelist, who also reads her work aloud and listens for rhythm, credibility of dialogue, word placement and repetition. She is quite accurate in claiming that it's so often not a matter of talent but of conscientiousness. I don't prefer the word "discipline," but whatever way of thinking about writing gets you to do it regularly is what gets the books written.
5. "You're never going to retire. You get so addicted to living your life on two levels—the written and the lived—that you'd go completely nuts if it ended. You know, left with mere life." -- Martin Amis, novelist. For some writers (and I count myself among those), a loss of the ability to write would definitely mean experiencing life in far less color and detail. It would be like losing a very valuable sense.
6. "The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." -- T. S. Eliot, poet, in this statement, is actually saying something a lot like what genre writer Patricia Cornwell stated above in #2.
7. "The way I work, I never know where I'm going. When I was writing Typical American I found it sort of scary that 300 pages in I still didn't see what came next. I swore I'd never do another book like that, it's just too nerve-wracking, but in the end I wrote Mona the same way. Just as you might look back on your life and understand things about yourself that were always there, but you didn't recognize immediately." -- Gish Jen, novelist, in this statement, reminds us that it's not always possible to plan your writing as you might wish. Whether you're working on a memoir or novel or other art project, you learn as you go. Nerve-wracking, yet, but also exciting.
Copyright (c) 2017 by Susan K. Perry
